There's recently been quite a bit of buzz here in Orre about Team Cipher's potential second resurgence, and how cruel and unethical it is to create and keep shadow pokemon, and I absolutely agree with all the arguments people have been putting forward, but I don't think a team is going to care much for ethical arguments, so I'd like to put forth an additional, more pragmatic argument that I hope has a better shot at convincing the cipher grunts and maybe even admins to desert: Shadow pokemon are horrendously easy to steal.
And I don't mean the whole coercing people into bad trades, scams, or just beating them in a battle and then taking their pokemon that teams sometimes do, I mean that you can just throw a pokeball, at a shadow pokemon, and snag it, and all you need is the pokeball, a phone, and the right open source software.
See, the thing is, as many people have repeatedly pointed out, pokemon really aren't supposed to be abused to the point where they become a new, heretofore undiscovered type, so of course modern pokeballs have safeguards against that, since they've been in a process of continuous improvement for several hundred years. So, if you want to create shadow pokemon, you're going to have to either start from scratch, or somehow break all of the safeguards (yes, all of them. What, you think pokeball makers don't tamper-proof them?).
So you now have a pokeball without any safeguards, and in it is a shadow pokemon! Congratulations! But, remember all those safeguards you removed? You're gonna want to put some of them back in. Namely, the one against getting your pokemon snagged. Of course, unless you stashed Dialga somewhere in your pocket, you don't have multiple centuries of time, so whatever you cobble together is going to have some glaring and easily exploitable flaws!
So, over the course of two attempts at taking over the region, you've fixed those glaring flaws, so it should be secure now, right? Wrong! PokeSecurity is a neverending cycle of gradual improvement, and you have just barely surpassed one percent of the development time of regular pokeballs, so you've still got some less noticeable flaws that anyone with the right knowledge can exploit!
And, even then, regular pokeballs aren't 100% safe, remember snag machines? They are a masterpiece of software and hardware engineering, a mechanism for on the fly creation and injection of an adaptive computer virus capable of fitting into a pokeball, and overriding not just the ball you're throwing, but the ball of the pokemon you're throwing it at too! They are also incredibly overkill for snagging shadow pokemon, akin to sending out an articuno for a mind reader+sheer cold double whammy against a gligar.
What I mean to say with all of this, is, I recently had a run-in with a cipher admin, and they challenged me to a battle. So I snagged their shadow suicune and ran, and now they are after me for two different, yet related reasons. Here's my rotomhub repo with my master's thesis on the insecurities of tampered pokeballs, along with the app I made for snagging shadow pokemon. Please send help.